Rule #1: Rules were written by people, and most people are idiots.
If there were one lesson to be learned throughout all of human history, it’s Rule #1. Amazingly though, there are billions of people who haven’t learned that lesson. Oh, sure they’ve learned not to kill 6 million Jews, but they haven’t learned to question their employer’s rules today. As a result, they get locked into enforcing outdated or illogical rules that make people’s lives worse.
The rules they enforce might not kill 6 million Jews, but they’ll waste the short and infinitely valuable time being bogged down with needless work. This will prevent them from accomplishing their highest level goals, ironically, in the name of doing what’s right.
Rule #2: A rule’s only true authority comes from its ability to help people.
Rules were created to serve people. People weren’t created to serve rules. When a rule ceases to help people, it negates its purpose for existence and thus negates its authority. For example, nobody would argue against the rule “don’t kill people.” However, rules have to be judged on a case by case basis according to whether or not they’ll help or hurt people each time they’re enforced. If a situation arises where it will help people more by not enforcing the rule, then it should not be enforced. For example, if you lived next to a Nazi concentration camp, you might decide it’s moral to break the “don’t kill people” rule if it were the only way to save the lives of the victims in the concentration camp.
Fixing computers for a living means you spend your whole day problem-solving. It’s insanely frustrating because you’re expected to be able to answer any question about any hardware or software problem there could ever be. Even if you went to school to study computers, all of your knowledge and experience is constantly becoming obsolete. So you have to constantly relearn your trade, but no matter how much you teach your self, you’ll never be able to memorize every error code, every symptom, and every solution to every problem that could possibly happen with every operating system.
However, you don’t have to. You’d be surprised how much you don’t have to know about computers and still be able to make a living fixing them… as long as you know how to think logically… which most people don’t. If they did, then most computer technicians, therapists, and police would be out of work. The following rules apply as much to fixing computers as they do to life:
Rule #1: If you want an exact answer, you need to ask an exact question.
When a user’s monitor goes blank they freak out and ask questions like, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why now?” “What the hell is wrong with this piece of shit?” etc. None of these questions are going to provide useful answers. So they call a computer tech who asks questions that cut to the heart of the issue such as, “What’s broken? What was the last thing you did before it broke? Does it have power? Are the connections loose? If we replace this piece will the problem go away or is the problem originating somewhere else?”
Life is the same way. When I’m sad, I don’t just mope around feeling miserable. I ask myself, “What is the problem? Why am I sad? What triggered it? How often does the occur and why? This keeps me from wallowing in hopelessness and ultimately leads to solutions.
Rule #2: Use a logical, systematic problem-solving process
When I first started fixing computers I’d freak out every time I got a call about a problem I didn’t know how to fix. I’d ask myself questions like, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?” Eventually, I stopped freaking out and learned to look at a computer with the cool air of a mysterious, wandering gunslinger. I’d take my time and break down the problem systematically starting by gathering all the facts, eliminating variables, and testing solutions one at a time until the problem was solved. And throughout the whole process, I’d keep in mind that if you’re not asking exact questions, you won’t get exact answers.
Eventually, I found my method of problem-solving worked equally well in real life. I could see it in my friends as well. The ones who had the most problems in their lives were the ones who sat around asking themselves, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why is life unfair?” These are the people who when you try to offer them solutions to their problems they argue with you and bark excuses at you for why nothing will work. The people who have the least problems in life are the ones who size up their problems logically.
Rule #3: The quality and quantity of answers you get are proportional to the quality and quantity of questions you ask.
Lucid people know that the causes and the solutions of any problem can be deduced by analyzing the variables in the problem. The degree of success you have deducing the causes and the solutions depends on how specific and articulate the questions you ask are. Using that mindset, they don’t wast any time freaking out or getting emotional about the problems in their lives. They simply go into analytical mode and start asking questions.
When I would get stumped fixing a difficult computer problem, I would stop, take a deep breath, and ask myself, “What questions have I been asking, and why am I asking myself these questions? Which questions haven’t I asked, and why not?” If I couldn’t solve the problem, I would ask for help from someone with more experience for help, but I wouldn’t just ask them for the answer. I would ask them to explain the series of questions they asked themselves to correctly deduce the variables in the equation so I would understand the system and know the right questions to ask next time and why.
So if you find yourself getting emotional about a problem, or one of your friends comes complaining to you about theirs, the first question you need to ask is, “What questions have you asked?”
Rule #4: Knowing where to find the right answer is just as good as knowing it from memory.
When I first started working at a computer help desk, most of my coworkers were equally inexperienced. We only had one guy on our team who could answer any question. I only used him as a last resort, because if I bothered him every time I got stumped, his entire job would consist of mentoring me. So one day I asked him, “How do you know so much? Why can you solve more problems than anyone else here?”
He looked at me like I was stupid and said, “I don’t know the answers to all the questions you guys bring to me, but I don’t have to if I know where to find them.” Then he pointed to his computer and said,” We’ve all got Google on your computer. There’s a wealth of information on the internet. If I don’t know something, I ask the internet.”
So now, when I run into a problem I’m having even a little difficulty with, I don’t ask myself, “What am I doing wrong!?” I ask myself, “Where can I find the answer without having to make every mistake myself first?”
I worked in the IT field for nine years, most of it as a help desk technician. It would be an understatement to say my job hasn’t been easy. Anyone who works on computers is part detective, part engineer, part psychologist, part interior designer, part whipping boy, and a shit load of other things that require you to push your mind to its limit in multiple directions every day. When you’re surrounded by intimidatingly mysterious problems every day, you think with your nose to the ground.
Computers aren’t mysterious, magical or spiritual. When you have a computer problem, you don’t pray. You call the helpdesk because deep down, you understand how reality works. Nothing happens because of magic, divine intervention or fate. Absolutely nothing ever happens for no reason at all. Every event in this universe is the product of a cause and effect chain of events. I’m not saying God isn’t real, just that if God is real, it doesn’t break the rules the natural laws the universe operates on.
When your car or computer breaks down, you don’t wonder if someone put a curse on it. Common sense tells you it happened for a cut and dry, logical, scientific reason. You can always confirm this by looking at the evidence and follow the chain of events backward logically to find the secular source of the problem. Yet, people pick and choose times to suspend sanity and slip back into magical thinking.
I once got a call from a user who said something was wrong with her computer. At the time I had a program that let me connect to other computers remotely and take control of the mouse and keyboard. I took control of her computer and started controlling her mouse remotely to check various settings on her computer. I made the mistake of not warning her that I was going to take control of her computer. When she saw her mouse start opening folders, she screamed into the phone, “MY COMPUTER IS POSSESSED!” That really happened. When I got off the phone with her I thought, “If this lady thinks ghosts haunt computers, how much else does she not understand about the universe? Her reality must be a scary place to live.”
A lot of people don’t like to accept that we live in a scientific universe because it’s easier to absolve yourself of ignorance by saying the universe is unknowable and to excuse yourself from responsibility because everything is part of God’s plan, and He’s going to clean up all our messes. It has been my experience, both a computer technician and a human being, that this is a destructive way of looking at life. It never solves anything, and it paralyzes us from taking realistic cause and effect measures to fix our problems. If you don’t believe me, then pray to God to fix your computer the next time your hard drive burns out and see what happens.
Or, when anything goes wrong in your life, don’t panic. Remind yourself, there’s a logical reason why it’s not working. If it seems mysterious, it’s just because you haven’t followed the cause and effect trail to the source of the problem using salt-of-the-earth deductive and/or inductive reasoning.
1: Accept you need to fulfill your mind’s potential.
Look at the graph below. Where on the graph would you mark yourself if the far left represented the ignorance of a newborn baby and the far right represented the genius of Leonardo Da Vince?
Okay, that was a trick. Without changing your position on the graph, replace the word “Ignorance” with “Insanity,” and replace the word “Genius” with “Sane.”
The definition of the word “sane” is: “having or showing reason, sound judgment, or good sense.”
Think about a baby. Does a baby think or act with sound reason, judgment, and sense? No. If an adult acted like a one-year-old, he’d be locked away in a mental institute. We’re all born insane, and our progress towards sanity doesn’t happen on its own. As we grow up, our brains develop and automatically make us more capable of sanity, but in to grow to your full potential you have to proactively use reason, sound judgment, and common sense.
Genius isn’t a condition you’re born with. It’s the process of pushing your mind to its unique potential. Once you’ve pushed your mind to what it’s capable of, you’ll be the person you’re capable of becoming.
2: Accept you’re capable of becoming a genius.
If you’re smart enough to graduate high school, then you’re smart enough to become a genius. How many song lyrics, movie characters, book titles, sports statistics, telephone numbers and street names will you memorize in your life? How many books/magazines/news articles/websites/blogs have you/will you read? When you add it all up, the number is astronomical even if you score low on a traditional I.Q. test.
You’ll never reach the limits of your mind. Therefore, the limits of your mental potential are defined more by what you believe they are than what they actually are. You have the potential to become an expert at just about anything if you would only allow yourself permission to become what you’re capable of becoming and push yourself as far as you can go.
3: Accept you’re ignorant.
Everyone is born insane, and we become saner by learning. But no matter how much you learn, you’ll always be an ant on a speck of dirt in an endless universe. Nobody knows shit about shit, and we’re all so lost we don’t even know how lost we are. So conceit is a delusion, and humility is sanity. The smarter you think you are, the less room and motivation you give yourself to grow. The more humbly you accept your ignorance, the more room and motivation you give yourself to grow.
4: Accept everyone is ignorant in different ways to different degrees.
Humanity doesn’t have life figured out. Our entire history has been a slow process of clueless adults raising clueless children. The younger generation always takes it for granted their parents’ generation has it all figured out. So children devote their lives to mimicking their elders only to waste their lives re-enacting primitive, obsolete customs invented by pompous monkeys.
Take everything you learn with a grain of salt. Even if someone teaches you something true, it’s probably still incomplete. Questioning people and their belief systems can only help you arrive at a clearer perception of the truth. Blind faith can only result in blindness.
Nobody can know everything. The end goal of genius isn’t to master every field of learning but to master the one/s that are most important to you. The only way you’ll have the motivation to master anything, is to love doing it. Find something you love, and excel at that. If you try to master something you aren’t terminally passionate about, you’re either going to quit or be miserable, which would defeat the purpose.
6: Develop a systematic plan to understand life.
Imagine it’s Sunday afternoon, and you don’t have to go to work, but you’ve got a ton of errands and chores you need to get done. If you just wander around the house and do a chore here and there when you just happen to find yourself in a room that needs something done it’s going to take forever to get all your chores done. Imagine driving around town aimlessly and hoping you run across the store or business you need to get something done at. You’ll never accomplish all your goals.
Becoming a genius (aka growing up, aka becoming sane) is the same way. You’re not going to be able to wander through life aimlessly, casually doing the things you feel inspired or hungry to do and hope to make the most out of your mind. You need to plan out what you want to learn and how you’re going to teach it to yourself.
If you want to be smarter, then learn more. If you want to be exceptionally smart, then learn an exceptional amount of information. You’re going to run out of time before you run out of storage space in your brain.
8: Learn and practice rational, logical thinking.
To understand the information you learn and make the best use of it, you have to be able to process the information effectively. You can memorize the encyclopedia, but if you don’t know how to think, all your good for is reciting information. The better you are at thinking, the more valuable conclusions you can draw from your knowledge.
9: Ask the right questions.
You might be able to cram enough knowledge into your brain to win every quiz game in the world, but that doesn’t make you a genius. What separates the savants from the geniuses is meaning. Is the knowledge you possess and are the questions you ask meaningful? Do your intellectual pursuits make a difference in the world? Do they help people? Do they advance humanity? If not, then it doesn’t matter how many credentials you have or how many people pat you on the back. Your efforts are meaningless.
You don’t have to be smart enough to figure out why E=MC2 to be a genius. The world doesn’t need 7 billion astrophysicists anyway. We need geniuses from every walk of life. We need people who can solve meaningful problems in the fields that they’re suited for. Solve a meaningful question and that will be an exercise in genius, but that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels for the rest of your life. Just because you did something genius yesterday doesn’t mean you’re a genius today. And just because you performed one stroke of genius doesn’t mean that you’re a genius in every other facet of your life. In fact, nobody is a full spectrum genius. Every genius is a complete idiot in other ways.
10: Question your answers.
Let’s suppose you questioned your personal beliefs and the foundations of your culture and found them lacking. So you went back and rewrote the rules and applauded yourself for fixing them. Then you lived the rest of your life by those new rules and taught them to other people. The only problem is you’re Anton Lavey, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Timothy Leary or Charles Manson. If you don’t question everything, especially your own answers, you’ll end up acting on irrational conclusions that will cause harm to you or others.
The Wise Sloth 